Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Patents

8-Year-Old Receives Patent 142

Posted by samzenpus from the young-inventor-society dept.
Knile writes "While not the youngest patent recipient ever (that would be a four year old in Texas), Bryce Gunderman has received a patent at age 8 for a space-saver that combines an outlet cover plate with a shelf. From the article: '"I thought how I was going to make a lot of money," Bryce said about what raced through his brain when he received the patent.'"
The Almighty Buck

Boy Finds £2.5M Gold Locket With Metal Detector 169

Posted by samzenpus from the all-that-glitters dept.
Instead of bottle caps and ridicule from his peers, 3-year-old James Hyatt found a locket worth millions with his metal detector. James and his dad found the gold locket last May in Essex. Since then the 500-year-old treasure has been appraised at around £2.5million. From the article: "James’s father Jason, 34, said: ‘My son is one of the luckiest people ever. If we go to the doctors he’ll put his hand down the side of the sofa and pull out a tenner.’"
First Person Shooters (Games)

Berlin Wall 'Death Strip' Game Sparks Outrage In Germany 193

Posted by Soulskill from the sweet-zombie-reagan dept.
gzipped_tar writes "According to Spiegel Online, 'A new computer game where players assume the roles of border guards and shoot people trying to escape from communist East Germany has unleashed a storm of controversy in Germany. The game's creator says he wanted to teach young people about history, but he has been accused of glorifying violence. ... The name of the multi-player FPS game, 1,378 (kilometers), was inspired by the length of the border between East and West Germany. ... [Players] choose between the roles of the border guards or would-be escapees: the escapee only has one goal — to get over the wall, but the border guard has more options, and can shoot or capture the escapee. He can also swap sides and try to clamber over the border defenses himself.' By choosing to play the border guard and kill the escapee, the player would win an in-game medal from the government of East Germany. But then the guard would time-travel forward to the year 2000, where he would have to stand trial. Jens Stober, 23, designed the game as a media art student at the University of Design, Media and Arts in Karlsruhe. He said that his intention was to teach young people about German history."

Comment Large linux systems today have 3072 processors (Score 1) 462

by kroyd (#33749424) Attached to: Linux May Need a Rewrite Beyond 48 Cores
(or more, probably)

http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/22/252 is a fun post on the Linux-Kernel list about missing caching of ACPI tables leading to 20 minute boot times. I get that problem every day! (I wish :P)

It is a pretty safe bet that you don't have to worry about Linux and more than 48 cores, as it is the OS of choice for a lot of the top supercomputers and OS research in general. Of course, applications which can take advantage of such systems is another problem, but that is hardly a Linux problem.
Image

Study Finds the Perfect Ratio of Attractiveness 176

Posted by samzenpus from the hey-there-big-arms dept.
Gksksla writes "Scientists in Australia and Hong Kong have conducted a comprehensive study to discover how different body measurements correspond with ratings of female attractiveness. The study, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, found that across cultural divides young, tall and long armed women were considered the most attractive."
Image

Frustrated Reporter Quits After Slow News Day 178

Posted by samzenpus from the take-this-job-and-shove-it dept.
Norwegian radio journalist Pia Beathe Pedersen quit on the air complaining that her bosses were making her read news on a day when "nothing important has happened." Pedersen claimed that broadcaster NRK put too much pressure on the staff and that she "wanted to be able to eat properly again and be able to breathe," during her nearly two-minute on-air resignation.
Image

The Push For Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" Rally 703

Posted by samzenpus from the giving-truth-the-bump dept.
jamie writes "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent 'Restoring Honor' event. The would-be rally has been dubbed 'Restoring Truthiness' and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own Colbert Nation.'"
Image

Woman Wins Libel Suit By Suing Wrong Website 323

Posted by samzenpus from the close-enough dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the 'y' at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it."
Image

Open Sarcasm Fighting Copyrighted Punctuation 155

Posted by samzenpus from the free-language dept.
pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."

Comment Here is a good test for the "obey the law" crowd (Score 1) 403

by kroyd (#32775360) Attached to: Tunneling Under the Great Firewall?
The F scale.

I've traveled in China several times, and as a "rich white guy" you won't have serious problems even if you make loud political statements that the party disagrees with. (E.g. here is a short list of forbidden words).

What you should be careful about is discussing politics with the locals. At worst you'll be asked to leave the country, but they can be thrown in jail or "disappeared" if they say, criticize party leaders.

In other words, using a ssh proxy is fine. There is probably even no law against it, except for the general "don't do things not in the interest of the Party".
Software

WordPress 3.0 Released 79

Posted by timothy from the now-even-wordier dept.
An anonymous reader writes "WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download and comes with 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements. Major new features in this release include a new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them easily to implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies."
Crime

Geologists Might Be Charged For Not Predicting Quake 375

Posted by timothy from the google-will-no-doubt-be-found-at-fault dept.
mmmscience writes "In 2009, a series of small earthquakes shook the region of L'Aquila, Italy. Seismologists investigated the tremors, but concluded that there was no direct indication of a big quake on the horizon. Less than a month later, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed more than 300 people. Now, the chief prosecutor of L'Aquila is looking to charge the scientists with gross negligent manslaughter for not predicting the quake."

Comment Re:One more thing... (Score 1) 1184

by kroyd (#32489080) Attached to: Apple Announces iPhone 4
Mobile videoconferencing is great for deaf people, as they can use sign language. (This is the only use of videoconferencing I've observed after quite a few years of pretty common availability here in northern Europe)

Slashdot Top Deals

Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.

Close